Under the chapters on Art and Religion we shall resume this topic. As earnestly as the Japanese are now availing themselves of the science and progress of Christendom in this nineteenth century, so earnestly did they borrow the culture of the west, that is of Corea and China, a thousand years ago.
The many thousands of Coreans, who, during the first ten centuries of the Christian era, but especially in the seventh, eighth, and ninth, settled in Japan, lived peaceably with the people of their adopted country, and loyally obeyed the mikado’s rule. An exception to this course occurred in 820, when seven hundred men who some time before had come from Shinra to Tōtōmi and Suruga revolted, [[61]]killed many of the Japanese, seized the rice in the store-houses, and put to sea to escape. The people of Musashi and Sagami pursued and attacked them, putting many of them to death.
The general history of the Coreans in Japan divides itself into two parts. Those who came as voluntary immigrants in time of peace were in most cases skilled workmen or farmers, who settled in lands or in villages granted them, and were put on political and social equality with the mikado’s subjects. They founded industries, intermarried with the natives, and their identity has been lost in the general body of the Japanese people.
With the prisoners taken in war, and with the laborers impressed into their service and carried off by force, the case was far different. These latter were set apart in villages by themselves—an outcast race on no social equality with the people. At first they were employed to feed the imperial falcons, or do such menial work, but under the ban of Buddhism, which forbids the destruction of life and the handling of flesh, they became an accursed race, the “Etas” or pariahs of the nation. They were the butchers, skinners, leather-makers, and those whose business it was to handle corpses of criminals and all other defiling things. They exist to-day, not greatly changed in blood, though in costume, language, and general appearance, it is not possible to distinguish them from Japanese of purest blood. By the humane edict of the mikado, in 1868, granting them all the rights of citizenship, their social condition has greatly improved.
From the ninth century onward to the sixteenth, the relations of the two countries seem to be unimportant. Japan was engaged in conquering northward the barbarians of her main island and Yezo. Her intercourse, both political and religious, grew to be so direct with the court of China, that Corea, in the Japanese annals, sinks out of sight except at rare intervals. Nihon increased in wealth and civilization while Chō-sen remained stationary or retrograded. In the nineteenth century the awakened Sunrise Kingdom has seen her former self in the hermit nation, and has stretched forth willing hands to do for her neighbor now, what Corea did for Japan in centuries long gone by.
Still, it must never be forgotten that Corea was not only the bridge on which civilization crossed from China to the archipelago, but was most probably the pathway of migration by which the rulers of the race now inhabiting Nihon reached it from their ancestral seats around the Sungari and the Ever-White Mountains. [[62]]True, it is not absolutely certain whether the homeland of the mikado’s ancestors lay southward in the sea, or westward among the mountains, but that the mass of the Corean and Japanese people are more closely allied in blood than either are with the Chinese, Manchius, or Malays, seems to be proved, not only by language and physical traits, but by the whole course of the history of both nations, and by the testimony of the Chinese records. Both Coreans and Japanese have inherited the peculiar institutions of their Fuyu ancestors—that race which alone of all the peoples sprung from Manchuria migrated toward the rising, instead of toward the setting, sun. [[63]]
[1] The story, told in full in the Heiké Monogatari, is given in English in “Japanese Fairy World.” [↑]